Dance and Music Reviews : Nanette Brodie Offers Programmatic Works

Dances in the service of drama, history and image dominated the concert offered by the Nanette Brodie Dance Theatre Saturday evening at Cal State Long Beach. Each of the six pieces had a program or some handle, making concept and intention easy to grasp.

The eleven-member ensemble, mostly female, represented themselves as pigs, horses, chickens and hillbillies in “Auction,” a romp to bluegrass music and the authentic voice of a rural auctioneer. For “Caravan,” they dressed in flowing fabrics and posed in golden light in front of a cut-out wooden desert, bathing their bare arms in silver glitter. A faux-Chinese effort, “Madame Meets the Dragon” used masks and a huge dragon head trailing streamers, as well as women in silk brocade jackets manipulating increasingly large paper fans; Tony Hernandez offered a briefly powerful martial arts demonstration.

Any of these works might have been excised from an amateur musical comedy production. “A Tribute to Women Aviators” and “The Dream House Dash” combined voices and music to accompany groups of women either liberated or homebound.

At its best, as in “La Reve Gotheque,” Brodie’s work dispensed with dance entirely, offering instead a carefully mounted playlet about a Victorian girl and the menacing sculpture she tames. Meaningful stares and stomping on stilts replace dancing in this work; the terrified girl rips out the statue’s eyes and then, having second thoughts, replaces them and hugs him.

Brodie’s current works are pale and perhaps inadvertent reflections of many themes now in vogue among major contemporary choreographers. Her dancers rarely get their motors going fast enough to sustain interest. The music was recorded; the audience was very small.